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Tag Archives: fallout 4

You know what else The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild gets right that so many other open-world games miss? The tutorial.

I’ve heard very little mention of how the game’s initial area: The Great Plateau, does such a great job of being a thick tutorial without actually feeling like a tutorial. It’s worth comparing it to how a lot of other modern games, particularly open-world games. Continue reading →

Something peculiar I noticed with three games during the E3 2017 presentations has to do with user generated content, how some specific games are handling it, and why they’re doing it.

Of course there’s the well-known news of Bethesda’s Creation Club which looks like another pass at paid mods. Two games at the PC Gamer Show however also seem to be heavily leveraging user-generated content. Continue reading →

It looks like Tom Clancy’s The Division is going to be Ubisoft’s next Assassin’s Creed II — that is, the next template for its games going forward. If it wasn’t already obvious enough, this seems to seal the deal that blockbuster video games are headed towards a service model primarily made of online games customers keep paying into. It’s probably smart business but it’s also to the dismay of people who don’t care about online or multiplayer games. I’m starting to wonder if there’s a service-based path for those consumers too. Continue reading →

Anyone who has been using the Steam Controller for a while probably already knows about what I’m about to type below. If you still don’t have one or aren’t yet sold on the idea, consider this post a mostly complete pitch for how it changes shooters compared to playing them on consoles.

Around Christmas I already did a post talking about how fundamentally the Steam Controller has changed my general PC use in the living room outside gaming. That alone might have made it worth the $50 for me. When I was forced to really dig into the configuration for Fallout 4 however, I believe it drastically and singlhandedly improved my experience with that game. Continue reading →

When writing the last post I realized I hadn’t really followed up on my initial post about Fallout 4’s opening and how it felt more like a first person shooter than a role-playing game. I guess most people who’ve played the game have already figured it out by now, but the rest of the game pretty much continues that pattern. Continue reading →

After coming off all these massive open-world games from 2015 like Fallout 4, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, part of me thought I’d spend the beginning of 2016 taking a breather with smaller, more focused games. I was wrong. Open-world fatigue seems to be spreading among people who play all the big games, but I don’t really feel tired of them yet as I start the first Witcher 3 expansion, continue on through Elite: Dangerous, and prepare to start Grand Theft Auto V. With Elite specifically I don’t think I’ve gone over what separates the latest entry from other open-world games (a lot). Continue reading →

Fallout 4 and The Witcher 3 have made me realize that one problem I’ve never seen an open-world RPG solve is that of carry limits and encumbrance. I talked about it a little bit in 2012 but developers haven’t really done anything significant about it since then and I think the common game mechanic needs to be reexamined from multiple angles.

I understand why we have carry limits of course. It’s not about realism at all, but more like a rule of games because being able to carry and/or sell literally everything could break the difficulty. In many cases managing an inventory is supposed to be part of the challenge. My issue with the system though is that leaving it up to an arbitrary number above which the game restricts the player to walking speed seems like simple and haphazard design. This is especially true when the rest of a game like Fallout 4 or Witcher 3 is so complex. Other, technically smaller games actually tend to have a more measured and nuanced approach. Continue reading →

The chatter around Fallout 4’s release has reached the same point of controversy as the last couple of Bethesda’s games (as well as Obsidian’s New Vegas which ran on Bethesda’s tech) — their generally buggy and unstable nature. Understandably, some people are baffled as to how Skyrim and Fallout 4 can be so popular while being so buggy, especially while other high-profile games get chewed out for their stability problems.

Wired went ahead and ran a story adamantly defending Bethesda and all its bugs. I think it makes some good points but I stop short of agreeing with it 100 percent. The main point that counts and the main reason I continue to enjoy Fallout 4 despite its stability issues is due to how unique Bethesda’s games are. Continue reading →

A few hours into Fallout 4 I have one general issue with it that none of the reviews I read touched on. It’s a bit of what I said I was afraid would happen in a previous post. The opening hours of Fallout 4 in my opinion run completely counter to what Bethesda does best and what is most unique to that developer… even if the result isn’t necessarily a bad game.

Basically, Fallout 4’s beginning feels paced like an action game and not like an RPG. I’m not specifically talking about the combat, but rather what you do and encounter when starting out. It feels very odd compared to Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas. In addition to this, how Bethesda has handled Fallout 4’s player character launches it headfirst into the main quest urgency problem so many open-world RPGs have while also hampering player agency a bit. Continue reading →

Ever since that bit of news about the physical PC editions of Fallout 4 came out I was worried as to what would actually come in the box. According to multiple people who have that box now, it’s even worse than I imagined, a pretty surprising move by Bethesda Game Studios, and a sloppy attempt at blocking piracy that once again only hurts the legitimate customer.

Through twitter, a few weeks ago Bethesda noted that Fallout 4 on PC would require users to download at least some amount of data from Steam even if they bought the retail version, as an extra precaution against piracy. The problem is if you look at all the stories reporting on this and the tweets themselves, they’re really vague about the fine details. Bethesda never said how much of the game would be in the box and how much was essentially digital-only. I had to wait until several people on reddit and the Steam forums confirmed Fallout 4 only comes on one DVD-ROM containing about five gigs of the game, requiring you to download the remaining 19 GB. This is almost as bad as when the physical PC version of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain came with only a Steam install file printed on a disc. I’ve seen a lot of comments from people confused about how physical PC games are usually packaged these days and how measures like this inconvenience people, so let me explain for a bit. Continue reading →